Happily Contained is Miao Ying’s first work using virtual reality technology. Installed in the show apartments for the Embassy Gardens development in Nine Elms, Miao’s VR experience is conceived as a form of ‘lifestyle hypnotism’, casting the viewer as consumer on a journey in search of utopia and contemporary ideas of home. From post-war suburban American tract housing to Chinese ghost cities, she investigates the construction of identity and desire.

Miao’s virtual reality is a world of firewalls and filter bubbles in which brands and tropes of our internet age figure as the agents of real life struggles. The heads of Unicorn companies – startups worth over one billion US dollars, like twitter, Xiaomi and Airbnb – are the winners when Internet culture plays out a zero-sum game at the intersection of the virtual and the real

Miao Ying (b.1985, China) describes her place of residence as the internet and makes work online, in print and in installation. Her work often addresses the politics of the Chinternet – the Chinese Internet – and its ‘Great Firewall’. Often employing irony and humour, Miao revisits our contemporary relationship to technology and internet aesthetics; interrogating and intervening in the circulation of ideas, ideology and value in our everyday lives, online and off.

Embassy Gardens is a riverside district in Nine Elms beside the new US Embassy, which relocated to the area in 2018. Ying’s artwork will be juxtaposed with Ballymore’s ‘Design Cube’, a marketing suite showcasing the evolution of the area and prospective outcomes for the new phase of its development. Please note: this venue has limited capacity; entry will be on a first come, first served basis.

Where

Embassy Gardens Marketing Suite

London SW8 5DB

Nearest tube: 10 minute walk from Vauxhall

Time

6:00pm – 4:00am

Extra info

New commissionMBNA THAMES CLIPPERS
6–8.30pm: RB2 service
8pm–4am: bespoke Art Night service
Alight at St George Wharf (Vauxhall) Pier
(8 minute walk)
Get 50% off return or hop on, hop off River Roamer tickets for 7 July. Book by 30 June, using code ARTNIGHT18 at checkout here.
VR HEADSET DISCLAIMER
Virtual reality headsets are used at your own risk. VR is not recommended for people who are pregnant, have high blood pressure, heart condition, or suffer from motion sickness, seizures of epilepsy.
PLEASE NOTE
The installation is being filmed. By participating you consent to your likeness being used in any video, photography or audio materials of the event and waive rights to the usage of these materials.